4 Stories One Must Read – Rewind Back to Coastal Cleanup Day!

As we celebrate Coastal Cleanup Day on the 18 of September, we look at 4 stories on Underwater360 that lets you dive deeper into what you should know.

1. The Consumption Conundrum

Convenience. It is the most vital ingredient of our fast-paced, modern lifestyle and the single, biggest impediment to solving the most serious environmental problem faced by humans today.

Cleaning up global plastic pollution is a major problem but the real headache is reducing the world’s appetite for this multifaceted material. With our rapacious appetite for economic growth throughout the 20th century, convenience has become the most important factor in achieving time savings and better productivity. Our need for everything to be faster, cheaper, better has made convenience an essential need of every productive citizen.

Read here on how plastic is so intertwined into our daily lives here.

2. The Plastic Diet keeping Seabirds Quiet

It is revealed that 90 percent of all seabirds have eaten plastic (PNAS, 2015). Parent birds blindly feed little pieces of plastic to their young, often mistaking the floating particles for squid and fish eggs. Little chicks appear from their burrows, with meager levels of nutrition as their stomachs brim with plastic debris. Such a consistently poor diet has crippled the health and functionality of shearwaters, making the journey from home to sea an arduous one.

Read more here.

3. The Plight of Our Rivers

“Rivers are the arteries of our planet; they are lifelines in the truest sense.” — Mark Angelo

Rivers have been extremely important to civilisations across the world since prehistoric times, shaping our cultures, traditions and lifestyles. They provide travel routes for expeditions, trade and recreation, supply fertile soils for agriculture, and serve as an important energy source that powers the water turbines of hydroelectric plants. With around 96% of the Earth’s water body consisting of salt water which is undrinkable to humans, we rely heavily on the freshwater of rivers for hydration and other domestic purposes.

But the rivers of today face an array of challenges posed by human activities including rapid urbanisation and climate change. According to the UN, 80% of global wastewater returns to the ecosystem without being treated or reused. This pollutes our rivers and results in an estimated 1.8 billion people relying on water sources contaminated with faeces for survival.

It’s time you should know about our rivers here.

4. The social distance between you and your clothes

Every day, we find ourselves at the mercy of our own purchases, fuelled by fast fashion. It’s a dreadful mess.

We buy things on impulse when we see they are 50% off before we realize that we don’t actually need them. The clothes we order online will likely fall apart when we wear them. We are in a constant loop of buying from fast fashion companies without knowing who made our clothes or how it impacts the environment.

The latest IPCC report has been causing a lot of stir, not only because it is 4,000-pages long, but because it highlights a code red for humanity. The urgency is in the air. In the very public conversation about climate change, fast fashion companies and their greenwashing practices have become too prominent.

Read more here.

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